I have been looking forward to seeing the resurrection of serious political coverage, and finally The Colbert Report returned to the air last night. And it was a wonderful surprise to see Richard Freeman — who taught me labor economics at Harvard — as a guest on the show, explaining what unions do. A topical guest, in light of the writer’s strike.
The full clip of the interview is available here.
Freeman v. Colbert was all Labor v. Capital, and Richard not only held his own, but also taught some labor economics along the way.
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Thanks for the heads up! Great interview.
It would have been much more convincing if he could have explained why unions have an antitrust exemption in the modern world (e.g., now that company towns are a thing of the past and geographic mobility is higher than ever) and corporations don’t. Offering an economic reason why it’s ok for labor to agree to screw the public and shareholders but bad for businesses/management to do so would have been refreshingly intellectually honest, though I doubt such a reason exists.
hillary clinton is the next Usa president. Great interview
http://www.radioboville.blogspot.com
“Offering an economic reason why it’s ok for labor to agree to screw the public and shareholders”
Yeah, because unions in 2008 are sooo powerful …
Those poor shareholders are really suffering, oh boy!
And those shareholders and corporations are absolutely powerless, if only they could outsource their factories to some asian country where unions exist in name only but where child labor would still be practiced, they could make us some nice lead-painted cheap gizmos to sell here and recover those drastic losses!
Here, if you have trouble with the snark, be a good boy and plot yourself a graph of the median income in the US (flatline) and Dow Jones (climbing and then climbing some more) in the last 10 years.
I thought this was going to be about Louis XIV’s finance minister. Would Freakonomics ever blog about him or other personages/topics in historical economics and finance?
This guy’s an economist? He plays the old saw that low wages increase the profits for the owners. Wages are just another cost. Profits have more to do with many other things than just level of a particular cost. Saying low wages will increase profits is like saying gravel dealers will make more than diamond merchants. Lifting wages cost the consumers of a product much more than they cost the employers, but no union wants to admit this. They want consumers to think the wage increases will come from excess profits.
I haven’t watched this yet, but if this guy knows so much about unions, why would he cross a picket line to appear on Colbert?
“if this guy knows so much about unions, why would he cross a picket line to appear on Colbert?”
The unions in Hollywood are nothing like Teamsters. Richard Freeman wont have to worry about broken kneecaps or concrete shoes with this picket line…